[Distutils] Introspection on eggs?

[Dave Peterson]

Andreas Jung wrote:
> I am currently working on a small PyPI replacement for hosting local 
> and private eggs:
>
> <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/haufe.eggserver/0.1.2>
>
> I would like to some introspection on uploaded eggs - basically I am 
> interested in the long_description and some other metadata without 
> having to
> unpack the egg and parse it on my own. Is there some API available
> for performing such a task?

I'm also interested in a response to this, particularly if it is better 
than what we already do at Enthought. :-) 

We basically unpack the EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO and EGG-INFO/requires.txt from 
the egg (you don't need to unpack the whole thing), concatenate those 
files into a single file, and then put that file up in our egg 
repository to ensure that tools browsing the repo don't have to download 
and unpack an egg in order to figure out what the egg is and what its 
dependencies are.  Of course, we hadn't been trying to be a PyPi, but 
simply a web-accessible directory that stores eggs.


-- Dave